Review: Turning Red (2022)

Turning Red (2022)

Rated PG for thematic material, suggestive content and language

Score: 4 out of 5

Turning Red, Pixar's latest, was a very welcome little movie. Taking the "lycanthropy as puberty" metaphor of Ginger Snaps and stripping out all of the horror and werewolf elements in favor of making a family-friendly comedy, it proceeds to combine that with a very particular nostalgic aesthetic that I haven't seen in many movies or TV shows yet, but which I expect to proliferate in the coming years as more millennials and zoomers replace the aging baby boomers and Gen-Xers as the driving force in creative media. It's a Pixar movie that tackles modern girlhood from an angle that's at once very specific and nearly universal, the fact that the protagonist is of Chinese descent being central to its themes but also presented in a way that I expect to resonate with anyone who grew up under a very strict family. It's just a big, fluffy red ball of cuteness that hides plenty of layers underneath its soft fur, a film that will probably stand the test of time as upper-tier Pixar even if it ain't quite in their Top Three.

Our protagonist, Meilin "Mei" Lee, is a thirteen-year-old girl living in Toronto in 2002, the golden age of Tamagotchis, Nokia cell phones, the Cha Cha Slide, and above all else, boy bands, particularly the handsome young men of 4*Town who she and her friends constantly squee over. (And since this isn't America in 2002, she's way less inundated by panic over terrorism, too.) She just has one problem, though: her mother Ming, who runs a traditional Chinese temple dedicated to their ancestor Sun Yee and has no time for her daughter's childish fascinations, going so far as to publicly humiliate her when she finds Mei's drawings of a guy she has a crush on. Like Carrie White at the prom, this triggers something in Mei, as that night in her sleep, she magically transforms into a ten-foot-tall red panda, learning the hard way about one of the Lee family's traditions that her mother never told her about. Sun Yee, you see, was bestowed by the gods with the power to transform into a powerful beast to protect her village and her daughters during wartime, an understandably useful gift in medieval China but not so much in a modern city where, until a ceremony can be completed to seal away her panda form, Mei must learn to repress her emotions lest she transform at an inopportune moment. Mei being an adolescent girl filled with hormones and emotions, this goes about as well as you'd expect it to.

The fact that Mei and her family are Chinese-Canadian figures heavily into the aesthetics of the story, from her transformation into a red panda to many of her family's cultural practices to the multiple references to Toronto landmarks and Canadian culture. On a more substantial level, Mei's strict upbringing under her mother Ming, seemingly drawn from writer/director Domee Shi's own life experiences, is one that is practically a stereotype of Asian kids in the US and Canada, one that's given plenty of layers here beyond the "tiger mom" archetype but is still immediately recognizable. Make no mistake, this is not a movie where the protagonist's ethnicity is incidental to the plot; it is put front and center right from the start.

And yet, the way in which the film presents it, at least from my perspective, does less to highlight how different Mei is from her peers than it does to highlight how universal her experience can be. Full disclosure: I'm white. My dad is a blue-collar Irish-American, my mom a white Gentile raised by an adoptive Jewish family, and if you know the first thing about stereotypes of Jewish kids and their mothers, then you can probably piece together a few things about my own upbringing. The person who Mei's strict but well-meaning mother Ming most reminded me of was my Jewish grandma, a woman who did a lot to prepare me to excel academically but also watched over me like a hawk, to the point where I always regarded her as a second mother. It's not even just a Jewish, Asian, or general immigrant thing; public schools in well-to-do areas of the Northeast and the West Coast are notorious for a culture of high achievement at all costs that touches every student, with articles written about the strain that kids wither under from an early age. This is why critiques of "stressful" Asian parenting from non-Asians have always rang hypocritical to me (and why the criticisms of this film as too "culturally specific" puzzle me): they let us deflect from our own complicity in pushing a very similar cultural ideal. Asian kids and parents aren't all that unusual, they're just exemplars of what we claim to value.

What this movie does is put a human face on it all by way of a fantasy metaphor, as the stress in Mei's life combines with her puberty and an ancient family tradition to turn her into the cutest, fluffiest monster ever. There is no clear villain in this film; while Ming is the most antagonistic character throughout, her own concerns are revealed to have come from a place of genuine concern and her own upbringing and experiences, especially once Mei and Ming's aunties enter the picture and we see that Ming went through something very similar to what Mei is experiencing now. She isn't a villain to be defeated, but somebody whose perspective is skewed by her bad memories of growing up in the same kind of repressive environment that she's now imposing on Mei. At its core, this is a movie about how, while family can transfer to us many laudable values, it can also transfer generational trauma, and that not all family values are necessarily good ones.

That may sound like a lot of heavy stuff for a family film, but it's layered in there right next to a tidal wave of fun, lighthearted humor, much of it fueled by a passionate, unironic nostalgia for every seemingly cringeworthy artifact of early 2000s youth. The fact that this takes place in 2002 isn't as central to the film's plot and themes as Mei's Chinese heritage beyond what was undoubtedly some personal appeal for Shi (born seven months before me), but it lent the film a unique aesthetic that, if the internet's interest in the "Y2K era" is any indication, will likely feel downright visionary in just a few short years. Mei and her friends' fandom of a very Backstreet Boys-style boy band (with some genuine bangers written by Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell for the soundtrack) is a major component of their characters and how they behave, and it is not treated as just a dumb joke to illustrate how silly and frivolous these little girls are; it's taken about as seriously as the love that the similarly-aged adolescent boy protagonists of Stranger Things have for Dungeons & Dragons. They do a lot of embarrassing stuff to try and get their hands on 4*Town tickets, setting up Mei's inevitable clash with Ming and her family in the process, but the film doesn't judge them or talk down to its audience over it; instead, it acknowledges just how fun a lot of this stuff can be. Hell, as somebody who spent his middle school years during that time hating boy bands and listening only to "real music" (i.e. pop-punk and nu metal), this was a movie that made me want to go back in time and experience it all again myself.

This is, without a doubt, not a very daring film on a storytelling level, but it didn't need to be. The moment I saw that the climax took place at 4*Town's concert and remembered the part where the ritual to seal up the panda form involved singing from the heart and that the lyrics didn't matter, I put two and two together and realized exactly what was going to happen, just like how, whenever you see a car chase movie set in Los Angeles, you know there's gonna be a scene where the chase goes into the LA River. But I didn't care. This isn't a movie where you're biting your fingernails wondering what's gonna happen next, it's a movie where you're rubbing your hands with glee because you know what's gonna happen next and you can't wait to see it, such is the strength of this film's storytelling. The jokes mostly landed, the characters were charming, the sights and sounds were a treat to look at, and all told, I had a very good time watching this with some of my co-workers.

The Bottom Line

Turning Red is Pixar doing what it does best, telling an impeccable story where you're cheering along even though you probably know what's gonna happen, like a boy band concert where you can recite all the lyrics by heart, all while landing some punches that connected with me personally even though I'm not Chinese, Canadian, or a girl. Definitely worthy of being counted as upper-tier Pixar.